FEEDBURNER
Val Landi's Weblog, Tuesday March 7
A year ago or so my good friend and colleague, Web 2.0 evangelist, Tracy Sheridan hammered me because I had never read Seth Godin’s famous marketing tome Purple Cow (Tracy was featured in his follow up ebook, 99 Cows—Companies that are Going for the Edges)
It‘s taken me a year, but I’ve finally caught up with Seth’s thinking thanks to Tracy’s post today.
Don’t miss this video of Godin at the Googleplex!
Watching the video, I see what Tracy’s passion for Seth’s message was all about. He’s not only a terrific speaker, but he’s a great and clear thinker as well. His three major takeaways are that all great marketers are great storytellers, great companies make something worth talking about, and that it’s at the edges where people notice you.
Godin goes back to 1999 and compared Yahoo with Google. Yahoo, busy establishing itself as the uber-Portal had something like 116 entries and links on it’s homepage vs. the 1999 version of Google, which is the exact same minimalist homepage we use and see today. What did Google do that was so brilliant? They differentiated themselves from the pack and in the process created a great product that was worth talking about, and they haven’t stopped since with GMail, Google Earth, Google Maps and Google DNA search all following in march step. Great stories, all.
I agree one hundred percent with Godin in his conviction that all the serious innovation and value creation occur at the edges, that the edge is the new core. We’re seeing examples of the this Web 2.0 value creation every day for the past year on the posts at TechCrunch and Memorandum and at Fickr, del.iciou.us, 37 Signals, Skype, Pandora. All companies that make sense and provide value and offer solutions to existing problems. All are examples of pure common sense.
The Web 2.0 boom is also creating some nonsense at the edges, where VC dollars are being spent on ventures that don’t solve existing problems or adhere to a basic common sense test.
Edgeio, oddly enough founded by TechCrunch media entrepreneur Michael Arrington and edge-guru Keith Teare, is one of the new edge companies that falls into the nonsense camp.
Edgeio offers a service that allows you to tag your blog posts with listings that let you sell personal items and or post jobs.
As Nick Carr, former editor of Harvard Business Review wrote:
“Cofounded by Michael Arrington, the madam of the great Web 2.0 brothel TechCrunch, Edgeio gathers specially tagged classified ads from sundry RSS feeds, aggregates and categorizes them, and then republishes them at its own central site. (Or, as it snappily says of itself: "Edgeio dynamically organizes listings published from RSS enabled websites making them discoverable via the Edgeio website and through an open set of web services.") So, let's say I finally decide to unload the old canoe that's been patiently wasting away on sawhorses beside my garage for the last three years. I could post a little ad on this blog, wrap the text in a special tag and, thanks to the genius of Dave Winer, it would soon show up among various other disused personal flotation devices over at Edgeio. Now, of course, I have no desire whatsoever to start sticking classified ads on my blog, but never mind that - it's the elegance of the idea that counts.”
Carr takes out his mallet to hammer the final nails of common sense into the lid of the Edgeio coffin:
“But most of all there are the two problems that Mike at Techdirt highlights: a lack of barriers to competition (the downside to building a company on "an open set of web services" is that your business model is really easy to copy) and a lack of meaningful differentiation from the customer's perspective ("We hadn't heard of people complaining that Craigslist and eBay were too centralized," says Techdirt, dryly). It's hard to see exactly how Edgeio will pry a lot of customers away from an entrenched player like Craigslist or protect itself from a head-on assault by, say, Google or Microsoft or Yahoo."
To sum up, Edgeio enters a crowded market with “a ton of pizzazz” and not an ounce of common sense.
(BTW, I went to both Arrington's personal blog, Crunchnotes,, and Keith Teare's as well. Oddly, again, neither had Edgeio listings for inflatable or any other type of personal devices, 63' Chevys, used gadgets or other sundry items).
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